Alaskan Smoked Porter

Alaskan Smoked Porter – Nothing fishy here

Alaskan Smoked PorterAlaskan Brewing co-founder Geoff Larson tells a good story. One you want to listen sitting next to a roaring fire on a Juneau beach.

Like the one about what he learned not long after Alaskan brewed its Smoked Porter for the first time in 1988; a beer that recently won its twentieth medal at the Great American Beer Festival.

Larson smoked the malt he used in Smoked Porter at Taku Smokeries, at the time located across the road from the brewery (Taku since moved to a bigger plant and Alaskan bought the old facility, using it smoke malt for the once-a-year release). He had a few reservations going in, most notably about fish oils somehow ending up in the beer, changing the aroma and killing the head. Those concerns disappeared when he tasted the beers and it sold out in a matter of weeks, then . . .

A customer told Larson the beer tasted of salmon. “I took it inappropriately and defensively,” he said, measuring his words and making it clear how bothered he was. It was months later before he had a conversation with the late Greg Noonan of Vermont Pub & Brewery about Noonan’s version of smoked porter that he learned something important about aroma and memory.

“Greg talked about first using hickory and customers would ask if he put hickory smoked ham in the beer,” Larson said. “Then he used maple and they asked, ‘Hey, did you start throwing sausage in your beer?'”

Larson began to understand the powerful memories smoke evokes. He realized it wasn’t salmon that drinker noticed but the alder wood both the malt and fish were smoked over. In Southeast Alaska smoke from alder wood conjures up memories of campfires and smoked salmon, while elsewhere maple smoke reminds consumers of Jimmy Dean Sausage.

(And in the upper Franconian region of Germany where beechwood is used to smoke pork as well as malt to brew the local rauchbier some drinkers describe the more intense of these beers as “liquid bacon.”)

“One smoked malt is not the same as another smoked malt. You can taste the difference between woods,” Larson said.

Last week Alaskan released the 23rd vintage of Smoked Porter. Alaskan doesn’t sell beer in Missouri, so we opened a 2009 bottle we bought a couple of years ago in Arizona.

Still smoky, from the start to the finish. But for us, the real pleasure? It smelled just like Alaska.

I’ll have the sturgeon beer, thank you

Sometimes we are our own context, meaning what you bring to a glass of beer influences what you take from it.

Rick Lyke writes about a 7-year-old bottle of Schlenkerla Urbock, his daily drink Monday, that opened with a big smoked ham nose. A fellow taster from Wisconsin taster said it was like smoked sturgeon.

Drinkers in Bamberg, Germany, where Schlenkerla beers are brewed, most associate them with meat, but in Wisconsin — home to Friday evening fish fries — smoke and fish makes perfect sense. The same in Alaska.

That wasn’t something Geoff and Marcy Larson of Alaskan Brewing necessarily considered when they first brewed Alaskan Smoked Porter more than 20 years ago. In fact, Geoff Larson didn’t react very well the first time a drinker told him his beer tasted like salmon. In fact he had smoked the malt that went into the beer at a fish smokery, but he had cleaned the facility obsessively in advance, fearing how fish oil might affect the beer.

“I took it inappropriately and defensively,” Larson said. Months after, talking to the late Greg Noonan — who had made his own smoked porter at Vermont Pub & Brewery — he began to understand just how powerful memories of smoke are.

“Greg talked about first using hickory and customers would ask if he put hickory smoked ham in the beer,” Larson said. “Then he used maple and they asked, ‘Hey, did you start throwing sausage in your beer?'”

It wasn’t salmon that drinkers noticed but the alder wood both the malt and fish were smoked over. In Southeast Alaska smoke from alder wood conjures up memories of campfires and smoked salmon. In the northeast maple smoke reminds consumers of Jimmy Dean Sausage.

 

 

Tomorrow’s classic beers

In the course of six revisions after his first Pocket Guide to Beer Michael Jackson elevated (and sometimes later demoted) only 20 beers to “world classic” status. He didn’t use the term casually.

As Alan fairly points out this was the opinion of but one man. One more qualified to comment than any, but just a important one who gave us an “exploration to follow.”

That’s why I keep pointing to what he wrote in the introduction to Beer (Eyewitness Companions). (He wrote the introduction a few months before he died in 2007; the book came out a few months after his death.)

First:

“Today, neither European brewers nor most drinkers on either side of the Atlantic have yet grasped that tomorrow’s most exciting styles of beers will be American in conception.”

Then:

“The nation that makes the world’s lightest-tasting beers also produces the most assertive beers. Tomorrow’s classics will evolve from a new breed of American brewers that are categorized by their admirers as ‘Extreme Beers.’ These are the most intense-tasting beers every produced anywhere in the world. They include classic European-style stouts that are richer, toastier, and roastier than anything yet produced in Ireland; ales massively more bitterly appetizing than any in Britain; ‘wild’ beers more sharply, quenchingly sour than their Belgian counterparts; wheat beers so spicily phenolic as to make a Bavarian choke on his mid-morning weisswurst; and pilsners so aromatic as to tempt the Good Soldier Schweik — the eponymous hero of Jaroslave Hasek’s comic novel.

“Sometimes the new US beers combine elements from more than one style, but with a view to achieving greater distinctiveness rather than to merge into blandness. The best example I ever experienced was the Smoked Porter of the Alaskan Brewing Company.”

Quite obviously he was not done exploring beer or celebrating the new. He didn’t find appreciating both “extreme” and “traditional” beers a contradiction.

You know, I think I’ll leave it at that rather than starting a conversation about what individual beers he would have given four stars.